J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > County Durham and Northumberland 1817 > Durham, North Shore, Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Title of Sketchbook 1817

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Title of Sketchbook’ 1817 (Front cover of sketchbook)
Front cover of sketchbook
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Front Cover:
Inscription by Turner: Title of Sketchbook 1817
D40917
Inscribed by Turner in ink ‘Northumberland | and part of Durham’ centre right, descending vertically on brown leather over board, 122 x 188 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram top left
Stamped in black ‘CLVII’ top right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s inscription runs vertically down the outside edge relative to the ‘landscape’ format of the sketchbook. Finberg adopted the rather less clear formulation from ‘Turner’s label on back, “32. Durham, North Shore”’,1 as the sketchbook’s title. This label, since lost, would have been one of the sequence Turner pasted onto the spines of his sketchbooks during a general review dated by David Hill to about 1821 or 1822.2
1
Finberg 1909, I, p.449.
2
See David Hill, ‘The Landscape of Imagination and the Sense of Place: Turner’s Sketching Practice’ in Maurice Guillaud, Nicholas Alfrey, Andrew Wilton and others, Turner en France: aquarelles, peintures, dessins, gravures, carnets de croquis / Turner in France: Watercolours, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings, Sketchbooks, exhibition catalogue, Centre Culturel du Marais, Paris 1981, pp.143, 147 note 34.
Technical notes:
The cover is heavily stained towards the spine, and the staining continues on the spine itself, the back cover and the pastedowns. As the page block is unaffected, the damage must have been done when the covers were kept separately, presumably during the Tate flood of 1928.

Matthew Imms
February 2010

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Title of Sketchbook 1817 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, February 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-title-of-sketchbook-r1139313, accessed 25 April 2024.